Impact of drought on crime in California: A synthetic control approach

Dana E Goin, Kara E Rudolph and Jennifer Ahern

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-15

Abstract: Climate and weather have been linked to criminal activity. The connection between climatological conditions and crime is of growing importance as we seek to understand the societal implications of climate change. This study describes the mechanisms theorized to link annual variations in climate to crime in California and examines the effect of drought on statewide crime rates from 2011–2015. California has suffered severe drought since 2011, resulting in intensely dry winters and several of the hottest days on record. It is likely that the drought increased economic stress and shifted routine activities of the population, potentially increasing the likelihood of crime. We used a synthetic control method to estimate the impact of California’s drought on both property and violent crimes. We found a significant increase in property crimes during the drought, but no effect on violent crimes. This result was robust to several sensitivity analyses, including a negative control.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185629 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 85629&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0185629

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185629

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().